Word: downwinders
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fallout from the accident. What no one suspected was that it would happen so soon, or that many of the first victims would be children. Two reports in Nature, one by the World Health Organization and one by health officials in Belarus, the ex-Soviet republic that was immediately downwind from Chernobyl on that fateful day, indicate that childhood thyroid cancer has skyrocketed from an average of four cases a year to about 60. Most severely affected was the Gomel region, hit first by the radiation: the thyroid cancer rate there is now about 80 times the world average...
...tanks and A-10 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers fired thousands of high-velocity shells that are made with depleted uranium, an extremely heavy metal that enables the weapons to penetrate the armor of enemy tanks. On impact, radioactive oxidized uranium is released into the air, which may have exposed anyone downwind to a lung-cancer risk. The Army and Air Force have judged the use of these shells to be safe. Yet concern over the hazards of depleted uranium goes back to at least 1980, when a New York plant that fabricated the shells from uranium metal chips was shut down...
...stopover in St. George, Utah, the previous year, Udall had heard wrenching tales of death and debilitating illness from cancer afflicting Southwesterners who had lived downwind from the Nevada nuclear-test site from the 1950s to the early '60s. Victims were convinced their illness came from clouds of radiation. Udall was outraged to learn that a 1981 U.S. Public Health Service survey had found cancer rates five times higher than normal among 15,000 white and Navajo uranium miners in the region but concealed the findings from the victims. He began filing claims against the Government on behalf of both...